Design and style
Footnotes suck
When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why? They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides […]
Assault and battery
Information Overlord thinks the look and feel of the redesigned Lawyer website is “just nasty“. That’s harsh, but it is certainly a brutal assault on the senses: hundreds of info fragments dressed up with red and blue all over and replete with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes (and token green and orange […]
A matter of style
There’s a discipline amongst publishers, adherence to which – in the eyes of traditional publishers at least – is one of the attributes that separates the professional from the amateur publisher. “Style” in publishing terms is a set of rules that a publisher adheres to in order to achieve accuracy and consistency in usage. It […]
Finding the hot spots
Although a lot of attention is focussed on grabbing eyeballs through search engine optimisation and marketing, often too little consideration is given to what those eyeballs do when they arrive. I’ve referred a few times before to “web usability guru” Jakob Nielsen. Like many, and unlike himself, I don’t believe he’s God: some of his […]
Time for a redesign?
Is it just me or do you think the new Times Online redesign is OVERDESIGN? Most negative criticism to date has centred on its use of lime green and the fact that their servers were overloaded and things didn’t work for the first day or two. There has been positive criticism – “nice” navigation, use […]
